M3GAN Star Allison Williams Covers Town & Country’s February 2023 Family Issue

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Allison Williams covers Town & Country’s February 2023 Family issue. She may have gotten her start on a certain cult TV show—but at 34, she’s a mother, a daughter, and the star and producer of the new horror movie M3GAN. The (already viral) film, which premieres tomorrow, gives Williams the chance to do something new, something different from her iconic role as Marnie.

In the cover story, Williams discusses how motherhood made playing an aunt in a horror movie “much more interesting,” how she landed her role in GIRLS, pivoting in Hollywood and she personally confirms her engagement with Alexander Dreymon.

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On the incident that made her get off social media: In 2017, when she kicked off the fundraiser [the education-focused nonprofit Horizons National] as usual, skeptical comments poured in. Was Horizons even getting these funds? Was it a scam? “There was so much bad faith throughout,” she says. “I’m someone who cares a lot about being understood, and the fact that people were…even planting those seeds. I was just like, ‘In what world?’ … That was the beginning of the end.” She posted on Instagram three times over the summer of 2020 and not once since… “I didn’t go into a Han Solo kind of carbonite situation,” she says, laughing. “Instagram was just poisonous for me. Some people can do it all, and it doesn’t seem to bother them. For me it was an impossible task.”

On how she got her role on Girls as Marnie:  I had heard that the role was hers within a week and a half of her audition. Williams grimaces: “It’s worse than that.” She got the audition—and thus the part—within a week and a half of moving to Los Angeles. She bagged an HBO show in less time than it takes sprouted seed bread from Erewhon to go bad.

On understanding her privilege with how she got her start: Girls premiered in 2012, well before TikTok discovered nepotism but long enough after the advent of Wikipedia that it took people no time at all to discover that each of its four stars had well-connected parents. Williams brings it up of her own volition: The four of them weren’t “random, like from towns where there’s no one else that has ever broken through.” It wasn’t fair, and it costs her nothing to admit it. “For someone with no connections to our business to get to the place where I was able to start, skill aside—that’s what people mean. And that’s legitimate.”

On the double standard of how the male actors on Girls were received in comparison with the four main female characters: Girls helped mint a microgeneration of talented male actors, Adam Driver, The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach, pre-Atlanta Donald Glover, and Riz Ahmed among them. People understood that the men were in a fictional show. The women were assumed to be in a docuseries, “rolling out of bed with a camera crew there,” as Williams puts it. The double standard still depresses her.

On how becoming a mother changed her perspective for the role of Gemma in M3GAN: “I became a mom, and that made it all much more interesting, because that’s Gemma’s whole arc,” she says. When the film starts, Gemma has zero children. Then she has two, “one that she created from scratch and the other that she inherited, who, while sharing her DNA, is not her own. That was going to be complicated, but it also became more interesting as a performer to bring this person to life, having a greater appreciation of the stakes of that.”

[Photo Credit: Billy Kidd for Town & Country Magazine]

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